Barnes Art Thrives in $150 Million Philadelphia Home

By James S. Russell -
May 19, 2012

After years of controversy and $150
million, the Barnes collection reopens today in a monumental new
home not far from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Founder Albert C. Barnes had housed it in an elegant
classical villa in the Philadelphia suburb of Merion, where the
display reflected his eccentric theories on art and penchant for
buying in quantity: 181 Renoirs, 69 Cezannes, and almost four
dozen early Picassos.

He stipulated that it stay that way after his death, which
came in 1951, but by the 1990s the Barnes Foundation was
struggling to remain solvent and sought a shift to Philadelphia
to increase financial support. Court approval came in 2004,
allowing the move while requiring the new building to duplicate
the form and layout of the Merion galleries and artworks.

Landscape architect Laurie Olin’s design leads visitors
from the grandeur of the Beaux Arts Benjamin Franklin Parkway
past a raised reflecting pool dotted with lilies and toward the
brawny, 93,000-square-foot rectangular bulk of the new museum.

I strolled up an inclined walk between graceful cedars,
past a silvery pylon commissioned from Ellsworth Kelly. I turned
left, ambling between flaming red vine maples, then turned again
to cross another reflecting pool into a high portal cut into the
massive blocks of honey-colored limestone.

Passing through a soaring lobby I found myself in a
cathedral-sized gathering space lined with stone chiseled in a
pattern resembling cuneiform writing. Its pitched ceiling gently
diffuses daylight from a long glass box that runs along the top
of the building.

Robed Docents

Though I had visited the Barnes in Merion, that long entry
procession did not prepare me for the exuberant information
overload the collection lays on. The first gallery is its most
spectacular: a high, vaulted salon in which 84 ornately framed
paintings and whimsical pieces of hardware cram every surface.

Bathers suffused in violet light by Cezanne surmount a
cheerful Renoir of the artist’s family. Barnes flanked this
image of glowing health with sober prophets and apostles by
16th-century painters Bonifazio de’ Pitati and Tintoretto.

All 23 rooms are equally crowded and equally idiosyncratic
in their juxtapositions. The Barnes has always charmed viewers
by ignoring conventions of period, style and chronology as well
as contrasting refined paintings with folk art and simple
furniture.

Improved Lighting

Thankfully the new museum is much better than a hollow
simulacrum of Barnes’s vision. Though the dingy mustard-color
burlap wall covering Barnes liked still saps some works, hugely
improved lighting transforms the experience. Fisher Marantz
Stone, the lighting consultants, bounce electric light off
plaster ceilings and mix it with carefully controlled daylight
from windows and overhead clerestories.

The result is soft and diffuse, like an artist’s studio lit
only by daylight. Marvelous textures and color subtleties
emerge. In this most important way, the new Barnes is a worthy
improvement.

Regrettably, the Barnes no longer feels like the private
realm of a connoisseur. That’s partly because the new structure
is so much larger, with the addition of full-scale museum
trappings like 7,400 square feet of galleries for temporary
exhibitions, a store, cafe, library and seminar rooms.

Holding Its Own

The architects hide the commercial elements, such as the
shop and cafe, yet the new structure can’t help homogenizing
what was once a unique experience.

The architecture elegantly insists on the Barnes’s
importance as a civic institution, which helps it to hold its
own on the parkway. But it made me think of other great museums
built for collectors of singular vision -- like Renzo Piano’s
Menil Collection in Houston or Louis Kahn’s Kimball Art Museum
in Fort Worth. They better balance a timeless expression of
permanence with a scale inviting to the public.